Battered by the tabloids—to the point where her boyfriend, Prince Harry, issued a statement defending her—actress and activist Meghan Markle has largely ignored the media storm. And as Markle tells Vanity Fair about her bi-racial background, her romance, and her hit series, Suits, it seems that this 36-year-old American may be just the woman for Britain’s iconoclastic royal.

Meghan Markle was going to London. She had a week’s hiatus before
returning to Toronto to film the 100th episode of Suits, a surprise-hit
series on the USA Network, now in its seventh season. On a rainy
afternoon in June, Markle came to her front door and welcomed me into
her home, on a quiet, tree-lined street in Toronto. Markle was wearing a
red, knee-length floral dress (“Erdem, a designer I’ve been wearing for
years”), with her rescue dogs, Bogart and Guy, wagging their tails
beside her. A slim brunette with a lightly freckled, glowing complexion
and an upturned nose, she looks like the sun-kissed California girl
she’s always been.

Markle had prepared a lunch of organic greens, a crusty bread to be
dipped in olive oil, and pasta tossed with chilies bought from “a
little place called Terroni, which they have in L.A. and in Toronto.
They’re really hot, but if you’re good with heat, then I think they’re
going to be your new favorite thing . . . I’ll give you a little jar
to take home.” Her warmth is genuine. She seems to be the happy genius
of her home of seven years. “Seven Canadian winters!” she exclaims
about her time filming Suits. “A long time for someone who grew up in
Southern California.” She has tried to make her Canadian house look
like a California bungalow, exposing the hardwood floors and letting in
as much light as possible.

For almost a year, rumors have flown about the romance between the
36-year-old actress and Britain’s 33-year-old Prince Harry—the
redheaded hell-raiser, former army captain who had completed two tours
of duty in Afghanistan, and all-around favorite royal. If Markle and
Prince Harry are indeed headed to the altar, she will become the first
American to marry into the royal family since Wallis Simpson famously
wed King Edward VIII, forcing his abdication from the throne, almost 81 years ago.

Markle is the calm in the center of the media storm inspired by her
year-long relationship with the prince. The couple met in London through friends in July 2016, Markle says. Since then, media coverage of their
romance has been so intense—and much of it so unpleasant—that Prince
Harry was moved to issue a statement asking the press and public,
essentially, to back off. They haven’t. Even Bogart and Guy have become
Instagram stars.

Markle, new to fame, has handled the hoopla with surprising aplomb. “It
has its challenges, and it comes in waves—some days it can feel more
challenging than others,” she says. “And right out of the gate it was
surprising the way things changed. But I still have this support system
all around me, and, of course, my boyfriend’s support.”

While arguably the most popular member of the British royal family,
Prince Harry is also the most iconoclastic. He’s loved for having been
the bad boy in his youth and now the regular guy of the family, for his
10 years of army service, including his time in Afghanistan (the only
place he ever felt “normal,” he’s said), and in recent years for his
philanthropy on behalf of combat veterans.

V.F. contributing editor Sally Bedell Smith, who wrote a biography of
Prince Charles, says, “Harry, who could have been the scapegrace sibling, was that for a while.” There was the widely released photo of
him looking tipsy at a London nightclub. There was the scuffle with a
photographer outside another London nightclub at around three A.M. that
resulted in the photographer’s cut lip. There was the “Colonials and
Natives” costume party of 2005, in Wiltshire, to which Harry came
dressed like Nazi general Erwin Rommel, complete with desert uniform,
German Wehrmacht badge, and swastika armband. A photo of the prince in
this costume landed on page one of the British tabloid The Sun. The
public was outraged, and Harry apologized. More recently, cell-phone
pictures of Harry carousing with friends in Las Vegas in 2012 went
viral. “It was probably a classic case of me being too much army and
not enough prince,” he later admitted.

After Harry ended his stint in the army, he focused on veterans’ issues.
In September 2014, he organized the Invictus Games, a charity event for
wounded combat veterans named after the 1875
William Ernest Henley poem schoolboys in England once had to memorize,
with the famous lines “I am the master of my fate / I am the captain of
my soul.” When Harry turned 30, he inherited $16 million from the
estate of his mother, Princess Diana, and that is when he determined to
spend his time and efforts supporting veterans with physical and
psychological injuries.

As Diana’s younger son, Harry continues to bask in the public’s love for
“the People’s Princess.” He has been forgiven his occasional wildness,
his drift, the acting out of a broken heart that had sent him into grief
counseling in his late 20s. As the royal favorite, there is keen interest in—and much speculation about—the woman he may marry. A
rumor floating in cyberspace has that he popped the question last month
when they were vacationing in Botswana.

As in the 1957 Marilyn Monroe-Laurence Olivier film, The Prince and the
Showgirl, a feeding frenzy surrounds royal-and-nonroyal couplings.
Though Markle is extremely pretty and she stars in a TV show, you would
never call her a “showgirl.” She is too serious, too well brought up.
(And outside of Vegas, who’s called a “showgirl” anymore?)
“Grounded” is the word that is often used to describe her.

“I was born and raised in Los Angeles, a California girl who lives by
the ethos that most things can be cured with either yoga, the beach, or
a few avocados,” she once wrote. Until recently, she maintained a popular lifestyle blog called The Tig. She is a self-described foodie, a passion, incidentally, given to her character on Suits. “I mean, this
bread is so good!” she enthuses over the delicious meal she prepared.
“It’s that perfect crunch and then the softness. They call it the
‘crumb,’ all of these little holes—oh!”

Suits, in which Markle plays ambitious paralegal turned lawyer Rachel
Zane, first brought the actress to wide attention. (Before that she’d
appeared briefly in the movies A Lot Like Love and Horrible Bosses and
had minor roles on television in the science-fiction drama Fringe and
the soap opera General Hospital, among others.) I asked the boyishly
attractive, 36-year-old actor Patrick J. Adams, who plays the likable
but fraudulent lawyer Mike Ross, Rachel’s love interest on Suits, to
describe the series and its popularity.

ROYAL TREATMENT
“I’ve never defined myself by my relationship,” says Markle, who adds that she and Prince Harry were “quietly dating for about six months before it became news.”

Photograph by Peter Lindbergh. Styled by Jessica Diehl.

“Getting to 100 episodes is pretty surreal,” Adams says. “I never
thought that a story about six people working in a law firm in New York
City would be something that would capture people’s interest all over
the globe. I was backpacking through New Zealand a couple of years ago
and stopped to help a Swedish guy who had twisted his ankle. He looked
up at me, and his eyes went wide, and all he could talk about was how
badly he wanted Mike and Rachel to figure things out.”

Mike Ross’s relationship with Rachel Zane is one of those long,
simmering teases that take several episodes to come to a boil, but it
was clear from their first meeting that they were meant to be together.
“I think Mike and Rachel are a classic Romeo-and-Juliet story,” Adams
believes. “They come from totally different sides of the tracks. Rachel
has taken the path well traveled, worked hard, and followed the rules of
the game. Mike is a naturally gifted, brilliant guy but has followed
exactly none of the rules.”

When it came to casting Rachel Zane, “we needed somebody in the role
that was absolutely engaging, relatable, young enough, who is beautiful
in a non-traditional way, and who had an authenticity,” says Bonnie
Hammer, chairman of NBCUniversal Cable Entertainment Group.

Aaron Korsh, the show’s creator, recalls that Rachel Zane was
particularly challenging to cast because the role required “toughness
and attitude while still being likable. . . . We all looked at each
other [after Markle’s screen test] like, Wow, this is the one! I
think it’s because Meghan has the ability to be smart and sharp but
without losing her sweetness.”

When she auditioned for the role, Markle showed up in black jeans, a
plum-colored spaghetti-strap top, and heels. It suddenly occurred to her
that for the screen test she needed to look less casual and more like a
lawyer. She dashed into an H&M and bought a little black dress for
$35. Sure enough, she was asked to change into the dress, which she
hadn’t even tried on. Thank God it fit.

“My parents had been so supportive,” she told V.F., “watching me
audition, trying to make ends meet, taking all the odds-and-ends jobs to
pay my bills. I was doing calligraphy, and I was a hostess at a
restaurant—and all those things that actors do. My father knew how
hard it is for an actor to get work, so he above all people was so proud
that I was able to beat the odds.”

One of the strongest bonds Prince Harry and Markle share is their
philanthropy. For Markle, it began at an early age. Her mother, Doria
Ragland, made sure that her little girl knew about the greater world and
its political and economic challenges when she was growing up in Los
Angeles.

FIT FOR A PRINCE
“The people who are close to me anchor me in knowing who I am,” Markle says. “The rest is noise.”

Photograph by Peter Lindbergh. Styled by Jessica Diehl.

Meghan’s father, Thomas Markle, was a successful lighting director in
Hollywood; he lit the popular sitcom Married . . . with Children and,
for 35 years, General Hospital. Markle recalled, “Every day after
school for 10 years, I was on the set of Married . . . with Children,
which was a really funny and perverse place for a little girl in a
Catholic-school uniform to grow up.”

Markle says, “What’s so incredible, you know, is that my parents split
up when I was two, [but] I never saw them fight. We would still take
vacations together. My dad would come on Sundays to drop me off, and
we’d watch Jeopardy! eating dinner on TV trays, the three of us. . . .
We were still so close-knit.” When she turned 18, she left for
Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois—becoming the first
person in her family to graduate from college—and double-majored in
theater and international relations. In line with her
international-relations major, Markle worked at the U.S. Embassy in
Argentina her senior year, “so I had been in a completely different
world and then suddenly jumped into this one.”

Markle thinks her social awareness began during the South-Central riots,
in Los Angeles, sparked by the police beating of Rodney King, in 1991,
and the subsequent riots in 1992, when she was 11 years old. “They had
let us go home [from school] during the riots and there was ash
everywhere.” As the ash from street fires sifted down on suburban
lawns, Markle remembers, she said, “Oh, my God, Mommy, it’s snowing!”

“No, Flower, it’s not snow,” Doria answered. “Get in the house.”

Markle’s friends, family, and fellow actors on Suits are respectful of
her relationship with Prince Harry, which has come under harsh criticism
in the U.K. Tabloids report that Queen Elizabeth will be hesitant to
sanction such a match for her grandson, following the ancient rule
barring Catholics, commoners, and divorcées. Though not raised Catholic,
Markle graduated from a Catholic high school and was married for almost
two years to producer Trevor Engelson, and she adds a new wrinkle: her
mother is black, her father white. Criticism of Markle has been
snob-ridden, racist, and uninformed. The trolls have really gone after
her.

Last November, the Daily Star Online announced, “Prince Harry could
marry into gangster royalty—his new love is from a crime ridden Los
Angeles neighborhood”; “the royal’s future mother-in-law still lives
in Crenshaw, surrounded by bloodbath robberies and drug-induced
violence.”

How does Markle handle the tabloid nonsense about her and Harry? “I can
tell you that at the end of the day I think it’s really simple,” she
says. “We’re two people who are really happy and in love. We were very
quietly dating for about six months before it became news, and I was
working during that whole time, and the only thing that changed was
people’s perception. Nothing about me changed. I’m still the same person
that I am, and I’ve never defined myself by my relationship.”

The media frenzy seems to bother the prince more than it does Markle.
The official statement issued from Kensington Palace by his
communications secretary read, in part, “Meghan Markle has been subject
to a wave of abuse and harassment. . . . Prince Harry is worried about
Ms. Markle’s safety and is deeply disappointed that he has not been able
to protect her.” As for Markle, she prefers what the British call
“ostriching.” She says, “I don’t read any press. I haven’t even read
press for Suits. The people who are close to me anchor me in knowing who
I am. The rest is noise.”

Photograph by Peter Lindbergh. Styled by Jessica Diehl.

Markle’s parents “crafted the world around me to make me feel like I wasn’t
different, but special,” as she wrote in a 2015 essay for Elle. As dolls in the 1980s were generally sold in sets of black and white, for Christmas one year her father bought “a black mom doll, a white dad doll, and a child in each color. My dad had taken the sets apart and customized my family.”

Problems began in the seventh grade, when she had to complete a
mandatory census by checking one of four boxes: “white, black,
Hispanic, or Asian.” The pale, freckled, curly-haired Markle felt that
to choose either white or black would be a rejection of one of her
parents. Her teacher told her to check “Caucasian” because she looked
white, but she couldn’t. She ended up leaving the boxes unchecked. “I
left my identity blank—a question mark, an absolute incomplete—much
like how I felt,” she once said.

Because she is light-skinned and has not made an issue of being
bi-racial—though she has embraced it—she has auditioned for white as
well as black and Latina roles. There was widespread disbelief among
viewers in Season Two of Suits when her black father, a high-powered
lawyer played by the charismatic actor Wendell Pierce (of Treme fame),
first appeared on the show—most people didn’t think her character, or
the actress playing her, was bi-racial.

One thing Markle noticed about how she was perceived was that “at
almost every photo shoot they would airbrush out” her freckles. “I’ve
always loved my freckles,” she now says, so when she was photographed
for V.F., she was “thrilled to work with Peter [Lindbergh] because
he rarely retouches and he believes in such little makeup. I gave him a
big hug and said, ‘I am so excited to work with you because I know we
will finally be able to see my freckles!’ ”

More important, what does Queen Elizabeth think of the prospect of a
marriage between her grandson and the American divorcée? When asked if
she thought the Queen opposed the match, Sally Bedell Smith, who has
written biographies of Queen Elizabeth, Princess Diana, and most
recently Prince Charles, said, “The stakes are obviously lower in the
case of Harry because he is now fifth in line to the throne [in
descending order, the others are Prince Charles, Prince William, Prince
George, and Princess Charlotte]. They have to be concerned—William
and Harry will always have a special place because, whatever you think
of Diana, she has a magical aura that continues. The fact that Harry and
William are half Diana . . . that will never go away.”

“The Queen is remarkably open-minded and she’s very tolerant,” Smith
observes. William was allowed to cohabit with Kate (Middleton), even
though she’s the daughter of “a very middle-class family. The Queen
just looked at who Kate was and that she was in love with her grandson,
and that she knew how to conduct herself with dignity and discretion,
and that was the most important thing. I would imagine that the Queen’s
view of this would be: if they’re in love and they’re well suited, then
they should proceed.”

“At the end of the day I think it’s really simple,” Markle says.
“We’re two people who are really happy.”

Bonnie Hammer expressed her concern about Markle’s sudden, international
fame. “She isn’t somebody who was already a celebrity, who had
paparazzi tracking her day and night in Hollywood or New York or
Toronto. She’s going through something that should be the most glorious
and open time in her life, to be able to share, but because of
circumstances, that’s very hard.”

Markle credits the rock-solid support from her close friends for helping
to sustain her. The international tennis great Serena Williams (who
recently graced the cover of V.F.) is one of those friends. The two met about seven years ago at the Super Bowl. “Her personality just
shines,” Serena said about Markle, who asked her advice on how to
handle some of the more extreme results of fame, such as paparazzi
showing up at her house and chasing her. “I told her, ‘You’ve got to be
who you are, Meghan. You can’t hide.’ ”

Another close friend is the Bahrain-born fashion designer Misha Nonoo.
They met in Miami through a mutual friend and immediately bonded. “Her
greatest strength is her compassion for others,” says Nonoo. “Much of
the work she does is unseen by the public.”

Another close friend is the actress Abigail Spencer, who has been a
Suits cast member. When asked why she thinks Harry was drawn to Markle,
Spencer says, “She’s got warm elegance, though her style is hard to pin
down. It’s classy and timeless. When you’re talking to her, you feel
like you’re the only person on the planet. And it’s just wonderful to
see her so in love.”

STRONG SUITS
“It’s just wonderful to see her so in love,” says actress Abigail Spencer, a close friend.

Photograph by Peter Lindbergh. Styled by Jessica Diehl.

It was raining in Toronto the day we met, and while this sounds corny,
it also happens to be true: as she resumed speaking about Prince Harry,
the sun came out, ushering in a brilliant, warm day.

Markle suggested that we move outside into the small garden behind the
house, where she opened up even more about the object of her affection,
her “boyfriend,” as she calls the prince.

“We’re a couple,” she explains. “We’re in love. I’m sure there will
be a time when we will have to come forward and present ourselves and
have stories to tell, but I hope what people will understand is that
this is our time. This is for us. It’s part of what makes it so special,
that it’s just ours. But we’re happy. Personally, I love a great love
story.”

Just before I filed Markle’s story, she texted me, “going where the
wi-fi is weak,” which turned out to be Botswana, a place Harry first
visited 20 years ago, shortly after his mother’s death—a place of
healing where they celebrated Markle’s 36th birthday. Whatever the
future of their relationship, one suspects that, had she lived long
enough to meet Meghan, Diana—beloved for her philanthropy as well as
her shy beauty—would have approved.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The sentence regarding the first time Markle met Prince Harry has been amended. Markle told Vanity Fair that the couple met in July 2016.